Useful Image Resources for 19th-Century Art

Dana Wheeles

University of Virginia

With new collections emerging online every day, it can be difficult to know where to look on the web for images related to nineteenth-century art. In my experience, a promising Google image search lands me on a ‘Fine Art Poster’ vendor five times out of ten! This exhibit is meant as a work-in-progress: a place to add new, open-source resources as they come to my attention.

Editor’s Note: This exhibit originally appeared on the previous iteration of NINES.org and has been reconstructed here. Where necessary, links and images have been updated.

American Civil War

Portrait of Abraham Lincoln
Flickr Commons

Abraham Lincoln Portraits on Flicker Commons

A collaboration between the Library of Congress and Flickr has brought hundreds of fascinating images into the Flickr Commons, where users can browse the images, tag them, and contribute to the metadata collection for many of those objects. Most of these objects are from the 20th century, but this collection of portraits of Abraham Lincoln are quite lovely.

Civil War Washington

From the website:
“Civil War Washington is a digital resource that allows users to visualize the complex changes in the city of Washington, DC between 1860 and 1865 through a collection of datasets, statistics, images, texts, and narrative accounts.”

Shorpy.com

Named for a 14-year-old Alabama coal miner, Shorpy Higginbotham, this site offers hi-resolution “vintage” images from the Library of Congress research archive. Although there is a wide assortment of pictures on offer, the Civil War collection is particularly useful.

General Interest

The Smithsonian Institution

Thanks to the Smithsonian Institution, over two million objects from their collections have been digitized and mounted online for searching and browsing. The site aggregates material from the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Freer-Sackler Galleries, National Portrait Gallery and the American Art Museum.

WorldImages

From their website:

“The internationally recognized WorldImages database provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It contains almost 75,000 images, is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery. WorldImages is accessible anywhere and its images may be freely used for non-profit educational purposes. The images can be located using many search techniques, and for convenience they are organized into over 800 portfolios which are then organized into subject groupings.”

Click here to go straight to the 19th-20th century portfolios.

Pre-Raphaelitism

The Rossetti Archive

The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Archive (aka The Rossetti Archive) is fully searchable in NINES. From the website:
“Completed in 2008 to the plan laid out in 1993, the Archive provides students and scholars with access to all of DGR’s pictorial and textual works and to a large contextual corpus of materials, most drawn from the period when DGR’s work first appeared and established its reputation (approximately 1848-1920), but some stretching back to the 14th-century sources of his Italian translations.”
McGann’s editorial commentary is tremendously useful alongside the images themselves, making this a Web 2.0 version of Virginia Surtees’ catalogue raisonée.

The Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery: The Pre-Raphaelite Collection

The Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery has one of the richest collections of Pre-Raphaelite art in the world, and in 2009, they launched the Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource to make those collections more visible. In addition to a tradition search engine, they have implemented a filtering mechanism based upon Artist, Title, Medium and Accession Number, making it even easier to find what you need. If you’re looking for anything by Edward Burne-Jones, John Ruskin or D.G. Rossetti, this is place to go.

Romanticism

Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era

This small but beautiful collection of images was part of an exhibition at the New York Public Library in 2005, and published in a companion volume. It is an excellent sample of material culture and how it reflects the role of women in the nineteenth century.

The Blake Archive

The most comprehensive collection of William Blake’s work online is fully searchable in NINES. From the site:
“A free site on the World Wide Web since 1996, the Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility.”